The Well and the Mine (3 page)

By the time I came back, she’d baked them both good. Faces red as a sunburn. Tears in Virgie’s eyes, and when I started to fuss at her, she said, “You told me not to let her get cold, Mama. You told me not to move.”

It’s funny—you’d think with that porcelain doll face, she’d be a selfish one. But Virgie’d lay down on a fire-ant hill if it’d help us, especially the younger ones. Ever since Tess was born, she’s been like that. Like one look at those mewling little faces woke something in her that tied her to them for good.

Albert
I CRANKED UP THE MODEL T, SLID ONTO THAT ALMOST-LEATHER
seat, threw my coveralls and boots and cap on the floor. Every morning I made the drive to work I was glad for it. I watched my parents scratch and claw in the dirt in a little shack on land the Tennessee Company owned and promised myself and God it’d never be me, with my family and my home at the mercy of the same grabbing hands that decided my paycheck. To be a man, you need your own home, not company-owned land. Need your own land for crops and a few animals so strike or no, you’ve got some sureness of food. Built the house with my own hands, and pulled in every favor I was owed from brothers and friends. Always wanted to add a second story, but never seemed to be any extra.

I didn’t bother closing the window flaps unless it was raining—I liked the feel of the sunrise to hit me on my face. I just barely got to see a bit of pink in the sky before I headed down No. 11. Those drives to work, with the bounces from the ruts in the road, cool smell of the wet grass, and the taste of sorghum still on my tongue, was the best time I had to myself. And usually I’d give somebody a lift, so it wasn’t really to myself. Then again, I wasn’t friends with many big talkers. Wished it took me half an hour to get to the mine instead of fifteen minutes. I’d drive the back way, keeping out of town and its waking-up sounds, just rolling through the almost-dark, trees on either side. I didn’t care much for town at all, to be honest, not like my girls, who were always wanting to go for penny candy or get a soda for a treat. Too much all crowded together for my taste.

Jonah was walking by the side of the road not a quarter mile from the site, so I stomped the brake and pulled over.

“Ride on in with me,” I yelled as he turned around.

“’Preciate it.” He climbed in, cap in his hand, already wearing his coveralls. The colored part of town was fairly near the mines, maybe a half-hour walk. “Doin’ alright?” he asked.

“Fair.”

“Heard about that baby there in y’all’s well. Family takin’ it hard?”

“Alright, I s’pose.”

Jonah’s father worked the mines and was still going down below when I started with Galloway Coal. Might say the father got pushed into the line of work—learned it in prison. Convict lease. Six years for vagrancy, and he spent that six years treated worse than a pit mule. Jonah’s papa served his time and made it out alright, but mining paid better than farm work, which was the only other work about any colored man could get. So he left off the prison uniform and headed back down. Union man. Jonah growed up in Dora, in what folks there started calling Uniontown. Negro strikers all of ’em, who got pitched off company housing during the strike of 1920 and cobbled together shacks out of trash, boards, rotten timber, whatever they could find. Said they’d never again live in a house they could get throwed out of. And even after the strike was over and they headed back to the mines, they never did go back to company housing. Jonah said they’d stuff paper in the cracks when it rained, watch the stars out of the holes in the roof when it was clear.

Me and him rode on in, hearing the mine—smelling it, too—before we saw it spring up around a curve in the road. The gob pile, just a wide, long hill of the trash sorted out of the coal, gave off a heavy sulfur smell that hung low in the air. The clang of the cars bumping into each other, the clatter of the conveyor belts, yells from men hollering to one another. All the aboveground workings were clear as a bell, bared to the sunshine and anyone who happened to walk by. The tipple stood above it all, part wood, part machine, the wood supports of it seeming too tricky—like a spiderweb from a distance—to be so solid. The sorters and washers worked on the coal when it went past them on the rumbling belts, the good coal rising higher to the top of the tipple, where it got dumped into storage. Finally it’d be loaded into the coal cars to make its way down to the depot. Nothing but dust and smoke and wood and metal, nothing green or growing anywhere in sight. Nothing alive but men. And them just another part of the big machine of it all.

All the day shift was filing in, with just a few of the men looking at me funny on account of Jonah being in my car. I reckoned it didn’t make no difference if I offered a man a ride to work as I was passing him on the road. It would have been different if I’d gone by his house and picked him up. I’d only been to Jonah’s house once, when his first child died one night in his crib. Only time I’d ever been through those Negro houses, just boards slapped together. It was a shame Jonah had to live like that—he was a good man, a hard worker, good to his family. Had my kids call him Mr. Benton, not by his first name like some boy who ain’t never shaved a beard.

Jonah and me didn’t say a word climbing out of the car. He nodded and went on, and I hung my legs out the door while I pulled on my coveralls. Cracked my back as I stood up, trying to loosen up my spine.

I pulled my cap off the seat and unhooked the lamp. Spit in the top chamber a few times, unhooked the bottle of carbide from my belt, and poured a bit in the bottom. The oil and spit would come together and make the gas that reflected off the face. The old kerosene lamps wobbled this way and that like a drunkard. A carbide flame was a steady thing.

Bosses’d have you believe you were part of something special, toting the world on your shoulders at Galloway Mine No. 11, with four hundred men going into its belly every day and prying out Galloway Lump. One of the biggest coal basins in the world here in Carbon Hill, they said. Always heard tell that long after Pennsylvania and Virginia mines had been picked clean, Alabama would supply the world. Was hard to conjure the future by the light coming off my cap.

Tess
COAL WAS SCATTERED AROUND THE GROUND LIKE BEETLES,
all shiny black shells. My hair was that color, not corn-silk yellow like Virgie’s or silver like Papa’s or dirt-road-colored like Mama’s. Coal colored.

But there was no coal rock in our yard, only down past the chickens. They were the start of the animals, who were all in a line down the hill—chickens then Moses then Horse then smelly pigs. Then outhouse. And then creek. Our part of outside was as neat and tidy as inside the house: The yard was swept hard and smooth, a brown, still lake with rosebush islands. It wasn’t hardly ever dusty because Mama swept it every day. It shined like peanut butter when it rained.

We’d got home from school, and Virgie’d gone straight to see if Mama needed anything. I hugged Mama then headed right to the warmer over the stove, cracking open its door to see what Mama left for us. Biscuits, still soft and warm. Mama’d always make a few too many at breakfast or lunch; they made for the best eating after school, once you ripped one apart and spread pear preserves inside. I was licking my fingers by the time I headed to the outhouse, walking a wide path around Moses, who was always sharpening her hooves to stomp me or gritting her teeth into points to snap at me. Mama nor Papa neither one would listen to me, but that cow was full of hate and vinegar. Virgie and me both knew it. Once maybe she was a good cow, pure white like her milk, but then some evil spirit came on her, eating her up inside and turning her soul black as sin. That’s when the black splotches started spreading over her hide. That cow always looked like she’d like to tear me to bits, even though without me, she wouldn’t have had a name.

I didn’t like the outhouse. You had to hold your breath, and it was dark and my bottom was bony and might could’ve fit through the hole, I thought. (It was a two-seater, but both the holes were adult size.) Before I pulled the door open, I took a deep breath, then jumped in and hiked down my bloomers just as fast as I could, counting the whole time. I could only hold my breath up to sixty-three.

Usually by forty, I’d finished my business, pulled out the bit of Sears Roebuck catalog I’d carried down in my pocket, and got out with a good ten seconds to go. If I could, I held my breath till I was back up by the horse instead of gulping air by the pigs.

I was done by thirty—Aunt Celia was coming, and I didn’t want to miss seeing her spit—and I leaned down for my bloomers. But right on the seat next to me was a fat spider—not a daddy long legs or a little grass spider, but something foreign. It wasn’t like nothing I’d ever seen before, all legs and squirming body the size of a finger. I jumped up and thumped it hard, and down it went, disappearing down the hole. It made me scream, and once I started, I couldn’t seem to stop. I hollered and hollered, took a gulp of air, and hollered again.

Virgie
MR. DOBSON SHOWED UP AT THE DOOR, SACK OF PEARS
in one hand, his straw hat in the other. He nodded at me, just a blink with his whole head.

“Thought I’d bring your ma some pears.”

“I’ll get her, sir.”

Mr. Dobson stood still, like he wasn’t even breathing, except for his right foot tapping. He’d do that until Mama got to the door. He brought pears about once a week, and I always paid attention to that foot. He looked somewhere over my head, at some spot on the wall that wasn’t at all interesting, and I didn’t feel it was right to look him in the eyes when he was doing such a good job of avoiding mine. So he watched the wall and I watched his foot and it was a few seconds before I remembered I needed to run get Mama.

She hated for us to holler for each other in the house like we were calling dogs.

The Dobsons didn’t have much besides their three pear trees. Mama would give him a basketful of vegetables and probably some cornmeal to take back with him. She always acted too happy about those pears, her smile wide and bright, and I knew she hoped the cheery, cheery pleasure in her voice—which made her sound like someone who wasn’t my mama at all—could distract Mr. Dobson from thinking about how he got a basket a lot fuller than the one he brought.

Mama was on her hands and knees in front of a bucket of sudsy water, and she said she’d just rinse off her hands and be right out. I passed that along to Mr. Dobson, whose foot was still beating a rhythm on the porch. He thanked me, then jerked his head toward the creek.

“Might be somethin’ wrong with Tess—I hear her yellin’.”

By the time Mama came through the doorway, I was headed down the hill, wondering what had happened to Tess. She always hated the outhouse. When she was little, she used to sneak and go in the bushes instead until Mama told her it wasn’t ladylike.

I walked toward Moses, who jerked her head at me as soon as she saw me. Tess wanted to name her Jesus at first. You can’t name cows after the Son of God, but she was only five. So she got to name her Moses. After the confusion about Jesus, nobody had the heart to bring up that Moses was a boy name for a girl cow.

She was the meanest cow we ever had. Mama tried to teach me to milk so she and Papa wouldn’t have to do it every morning, but I couldn’t. Their teats looked soft and pliable, like they’d be no rougher on you than squeezing a sack of water, but there was a knack to how you pulled them. Trying to learn the feel of it, your wrists swelled up and your fingers felt like they’d been skint on gravel.

I called for Tess, hoping she’d answer me before I had to pass Moses. The cow was just outside the barn, grazing, and I wished Mama had left her in the stall. She started shaking her black-and-white head. I wanted to turn around, but I could tell she wanted to run at me, and Papa always told me to walk on by her and don’t let her know I was afraid. But she knew.

I stood like a statue, and Tess came from behind the barn. She wore her favorite dress, lavender-checked with pockets shaped like chickens, embroidered with black trim around the bottom and the chickens. Our aunt Merilyn had sewed it.

“She’s gone run at you,” she whispered.

“Shhh.” I kept staring at Moses, who was still shaking her head, eyes rolling. She looked at Tess and seemed to hate her about as much as she hated me. Tess took two steps back.

“Papa says don’t show her you’re afraid, and she’ll go right on grazing,” she said, not sounding too convinced. But she lifted her pointy little chin up higher.

“I know.” I stepped back, too, and it made me mad that this wobbly thing with her awkward swinging udders and too-big tongue made me afraid. Chickens and pigs and Horse—they all knew their place. Even the rat dog Papa kept around the barn. But this cow thought she had some hold over us. Like she knew we needed the milk and that gave her some kind of confidence not at all proper for an animal to have. That cow was overfull of pride.

I looked back at her, looked her straight in the eyes. I almost took a step toward her, but she moved enough, just a twitch, to scare me. I looked away then, and so did Tess. We both ran all the way back up to the road, dresses flapping up around us. As always, I tried to hold mine down.

“Were you yellin’ at somethin’?” I asked, smoothing my hair.

“A spider.” She looked up at the porch and grinned, then took off like a shot toward the steps.

Papa’s sister Celia was standing on the porch, leaning over the railing to spit. She had Papa’s blue eyes, and curly, dark hair that fought her braid every step of the way. She spiraled it like a snail shell at the back of her neck, and it was bigger than an orange. Her face was all angles, and she was tall as Papa. He always smiled whenever she showed up.

Aunt Celia was also the spittiest woman I ever saw. She spit Copenhagen way out, over the porch rail, over the rosebushes, and sometimes almost clean to the road. She thought it was disgusting for women to smoke cigarettes.

Tess ran up to her and hugged her neck. “Did ya hear, Aunt Celia? About the baby in the well?”